There are no war heroes. Only victims

Insights

Caitlin Johnstone There are no war heroes. Only victims

Some thoughts on the recent American elections. And on the people who did their best to make sure that the elections were “the fairest in the world”. ——————— “The media do not decide who’s president!” Uhh, yeah they kinda do. They spent two years sabotaging progressive primary candidates and spent this year manufacturing consent for Biden. They manipulate the thoughts people think about power, and they can install whomever they wish. ——————— Republicans spent years calling a fake Russia narrative that posed no risk of removing Trump a “coup”. Now Democrats are calling a glorified temper tantrum a “coup”. The government that stages the most coups around the world has no idea what they are. They’re not scaring you about a Trump “coup” because there is any possibility of that ever happening, they’re doing it because it’s their last chance to use Trump to psychologically abuse you for clicks. ——————— Biden is a hollowed out husk of a man whose insides have been entirely filled with corporate logos. Anyone who is already defending Biden and saying you’re being too hard on him will be completely useless for the next four to eight years. ——————— You can get rid of Trump, but people who say the mass media are crooks and liars will keep getting traction and attention with that message. Because it is true, and people know it is true. ——————— Liberal pundits have loved to promote the narrative that Trump is uniquely cozy with dictators because it lets them both (a) attack him for being insufficiently hawkish toward nations like Russia and North Korea and (b) pretend their favourite presidents haven’t been extremely cozy with dictators. ——————— Liberal media writers assured us that if Trump was elected in 2016 there’d be millions of deportations, Muslims in concentration camps and alt-right militias driving minorities out of the country. Instead we got another shitty Reagan Republican, total amnesia for Bush and Obama’s crimes, and a bunch of psychologically traumatised liberals who just lived through the Holocaust in their minds. ——————— It is impossible to say Trump is uniquely evil among presidents without rehabilitating George W. Bush. It can’t be done, because nothing Trump did is as bad as an invasion that killed more than a million people, destabilised the Middle East and ushered in an unprecedented era of military expansionism which displaced tens of millions of people.

That’s always been the most destructive element of Trump hysteria: not that it’s unfair to Trump, but that it necessarily erases the crimes of his predecessors and of future presidents. It blurs out the criminal nature of the US empire as an institution by making it about one guy. ——————— I want a system where corporations are fined for any litter they produce that winds up on the street or in the ocean. We need to reverse the burden and make it in their financial interest to create packaging and recycling systems that are closed loops.

You could have collectors whose job it is to find trash and tally up the fines. A buck a cup or whatever. It wouldn’t even have to be the government doing it; it could easily be done by the private sector because there is a fiscal motivation for finding trash. ——————— In the old days whole empires were built around religions and their theocratic institutions, which used their doctrines to shape society in service of the powerful. Nowadays the same thing happens, but the religion is called “capitalism”. ——————— One party wants to roll back most of the environmental measures. The other party that wants to